I hope the Americans will understand that the present state of culture of the Filipino people shall not put up with subjugation by force as a permanent condition. The Filipinos may be vanquished now and again, but as long as they are denied every kind of right, there will not be lasting peace…

–Apolinario Mabini

It would be false, however, to expect that the old fine-sounding justifications of Western colonial policies would perish with the historical preconditions on which they are based. It is in the nature of an ideology to gain severity as it loses practical validity. And thus it is by no means paradoxical that the most obstinate support for the theory of evolution and education by capitalist colonization is found today in the public opinion of the one country [United States] which cannot even furnish a real basis in experience for the theory in its history.

–Karl Korsch

We did what we ourselves [peasant masses] had decided upon–as free people, and power resides in the people. What we did was our heritage… We decided to rebel, to rise up and strike down the sources of power. I said ‘We are Sakdals! We want immediate, complete, and absolute independence.’ No uprising fails. Each one is a step in the right direction

–Salud Algabre

The controversy over the bells of Balangiga on the Centenary of the First Philippine Republic may yield more than a journalistic and diplomatic side-entertainment. Amid the postcolonial abjection to the persisting legacy of U.S. neocolonialism, it is salutary to revitalize popular memory by welcoming the “return of the repressed.” Shortly after General Emilio Aguinaldo’s revolutionary forces inaugurated the Republic in June 1898, the Filipino-American War broke out, resulting in the death of about a million Filipinos, the brutal destruction of the nationalist forces, and the U.S. colonial subjugation of the Philippines for over half a century.
One of the few incidents in which the Filipino guerillas inflicted a devastating defeat on the United States expeditionary forces was the attack at Balangiga, a town in Samar province, on September 28, 1901. Of the 74 soldiers in the 9th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. army stationed at the town, 45 were killed and 22 wounded–almost the entire regiment. In retaliation, Gen. Jacob Smith who commanded the Marine battalion sent to reinforce the occupation troops ordered a mass slaughter: “The interior of Samar must be made a howling wilderness.”1 This unofficial U.S. policy of indiscriminate pacification made the war an unpremeditated rehearsal of Vietnam and a template for the colonial/neocolonial subjugation of Filipinos for the entire century. We have not yet fully recovered from the effects of that “howling wilderness.”
When the American veterans of the Indian Wars and the Philippine pacification campaign returned, they brought with them three bells confiscated from the Catholic church in Balangiga two of which are kept at Francis Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming. On the occasion of the Centenary, the Philippine government has requested Washington to return one of the bells and a copy of the other; the military has so far refused. A retired general who is civilian adviser to the base justifies the refusal: “We don’t have to rewrite history and give back the bells because, yeah, our men were involved in atrocities too… Those bells were used to make the attack against our troops.” 2 For whom the bells toll?–this is a question that has already been answered by the resistance of Macario Sakay, Pedro Abad Santos, Salud Algabre, Rolando Olalia, and many other victims-martyrs of U.S. imperialist intervention in the Philippines.
In both academy and public commonsense, however, “U.S. imperialism” does not exist–even as an aberration, like the Vietnam war, or as a fit of mindlessness. To remedy this amnesia, we need to problematize the received consensus of U.S. history. At the same time we need to appraise and critique the position of reactionary and postmodernizing nativism purveyed by the parasitic comprador elite. What may be instructive and heuristic for this occasion is a selective review of how the disciplinary regime of Western domination and its peculiar mode of articulating racial/cultural difference in the Philippines–an instance of academic hubris predicated on the inferiorization of the cultures of “Others” for its own self-validation–have been “produced” and circulated by liberal discourse with “postcolonial” pretensions. Its recent postmodernist reincarnation calls for urgent critique if we need to rectify a centenary of liberal-democratic mystification and racist violence.3

After the February Storm

For the first time since the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the fall of Bataan and Corregidor to the Japanese invaders in 1942, the Philippines dominated the world’s attention for a few days in February 1986: an urban mass insurrection of over a million people overthrew the long-entrenched Marcos dictatorship without too much bloodshed, in the face of tanks and soldiers armed to the teeth.4 Scenes of this uprising were televised throughout the world, images exuding an aura of the miraculous. Few know that the restoration of neocolonial democracy–rule of transnationals through the comprador/oligarchic elite–after that event ushered a new stage for the revival of neocolonial apparatuses of domination, agencies of hegemonic rule designed to protract the nation’s subservience to transnational corporations and the IMF/World Bank.5
Less publicized is one epochal achievement of the nationalist resurgence that began with the student revolts called the “First Quarter Storm” in 1970 and persists up to this day: in 1992, the U.S. government finally yielded to Filipino resolve and abandoned its two huge military installations (Clark Air Field and Subic Naval Base), symbols of colonial suzerainty and possibly (as springboard for intervention in the China market and the Asian-Pacific geopolitical theater) the main reason for U.S. territorial annexation of the islands.5 Despite some attenuation, the Philippines today has the only viable communist-led guerilla insurgency in the whole world.
But like most “Third World” societies plagued by vestiges of colonial bondage, the Philippines today suffers the negativity, not the dynamic fruitfulness, of contradictions. Although nominally independent, its economy is controlled by the draconian “conditionalities” of the IMF-World Bank, its politics by semi-feudal warlords, bureaucrats, and military officials beholden to Washington, its culture by U.S. consciousness industry–in general, by Western information/knowledge-production monopoly.6 Although direct colonial rule was finally terminated in 1946, the cultural and political hegemony of the United States persists to this day. When the Reagan administration intervened in 1986 to shore up the ruins of empire by rescuing its client despot from the wrath of Filipinos and install a new set of overseers (namely Corazon Aquino and her successor, General Fidel Ramos, former “impresario” of Marcos’s martial law), it was less nostalgia than a tactical defensive retreat. Desperate maneuvers to salvage the military bases confirmed a long-range strategy of retrenchment.7 There was definitely no retreat in the realm of politics, ideology, and culture, given the claim of academic pundits (for example, Claude Buss and Richard Kessler) that such intervention demonstrated U.S. goodwill to preserve its investment in its long-revered “showcase of democracy” in Asia after its debacle in Vietnam. 8
Whatever the fixations of U.S. civic memory, the public is now about to celebrate the centennial anniversary of Admiral George Dewey’s defeat of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on 1 May 1898–a farce turned into a heroic milestone.9 Perhaps the commemoration will not be accompanied by the usual jingoistic fanfare of yore despite the nostalgic reassertion of proprietary rights over the Balangiga souvenirs. We are after all inhabiting today a “New World Order” characterized by U.S. triumphalist incursions in the Middle East and its post-Cold War refurbishing of humanitarianism and “free market” nostrums.10
Contrary to the claim that the first U.S.-Philippines contact began when Filipino recruits jumped off the Spanish galleons in the seventeenth century and settled near what is now New Orleans, Louisiana, I would contend that the inaugural scene points to the intrusion of Dewey into Manila Bay in 1898. That was immediately followed by the Filipino-American War (1899-1902), an event charged with antinomies: while suppressing the revolutionary forces, it laid the groundwork for proletarian unionism and the rise of organic intellectuals of the nation-people born from “uneven and combined development.” U.S. hegemonic power continues today in covert, mediated or sublimated forms–proof that what Mark Twain called the Philippine “temptation” persists amid profound mutations in the physiognomy of transnational, postFordist capital.
But for the moment I want to cite here Twain’s comment on the U.S. (mis)adventure which (in Carey McWilliams’ s view) prompted the government to “guide the natives in ways of our own choosing,” especially when the “lesser breeds” or “little brown brothers occupied a potentially rich land.”11 The ironic resonance of this self-proclaimed “civilizing mission” is registered in Twain’s inimitable idiom:

We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields, burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag. And so, by these Providences of God–and the phrase is the government’s, not mine–we are a World Power. 12

In his nuanced satire, Twain marvelled at the report that thirty thousand American soldiers killed a million Filipinos: “Thirty thousand killed a million. It seems a pity that the historian let that get out; it is really a most embarrassing circumstance.”13 In February 1899, the month in which the Filipino-American War began and the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty formalizing the annexation of Spain’s former colonies, Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” appeared. In it the poet echoed U.S. Senator Albert Beveridge’s claim of “the mission of our race, trustee under God, of the civilization of the world.” 14
This inaugural event in the chronicle of U.S. territorial expansionism is not without precedent, a fact thoroughly documented and argued by Gareth Stedman Jones, William Appleman Williams, Michael Hunt, and others.15 From the Monroe Doctrine to the Tonkin Gulf resolution, a narrative of intervention gives intelligibility and telos to U.S. foreign policy. In his perspicacious commentary on the U.S. war machine, Star Wars, H. Bruce Franklin remarks: “The warfare waged against the Cuban and Philippine nationalists, for whose ostensible benefit we had defeated Spain, was an export of the genocidal campaigns against the ‘savages’ and ‘redskins’ who had inhabited North America.”16 This cognitive/contextual mapping is performed by Richard Hofstadter in his essay, “Cuba, the Philippines, and Manifest Destiny,” in which he delineated the configuration of “psychic crisis” that intertwined several elements: the chauvinist self-aggrandizement of the 1890s, the imperialist ethos of duty and populist self-assertion, the disappearance of the frontier, and the bureaucratization of business amid cyclical economic depression.17 In a masterly synoptic reappraisal, Gabriel Kolko returns us to Twain’s insight and supplies an optic through which U.S. Realpolitik (euphemistically labeled “sentimental” and “benevolent”) acquires its undeniable genealogy:

In Asia the framework in which United States efforts proceeded was far more complicated and, ultimately, was to fail to preserve both peace and American power in an environment in which the balance-of-power diplomacy was eventually to become increasingly irrelevant before the tides of nationalism and revolution germinating throughout Asia. But the first American entry–and the most ignored–was the bloody acquisition of the Philippines and the long repression, eventually costing at least 200,000 Filipino lives, which was required when the Americans found that in order really to take the islands they had first to retrieve it by force and chicanery from a Filipino independence movement largely in control at the end of the war with Spain. Americans, with few exceptions, refused to reflect on the enormity of this crime, which it later repeated again in a yet more brutal form in Vietnam. But it was from this island base, held firmly in hand with terrible force, and then also co-option and cultural imperialism, that the United States was to embark on its Asian role, a role that eventually became the most demanding and troublesome in America’s long history….18

This synthesizing historiographic stance, an intellectual orientation enabled not by Nietzsche and deconstructive postcolonialists but by the now much maligned “national liberation” struggles, has been expunged from approved textbooks and from civic memory. But despite the prevalent neoconservative atmosphere with its cynical bureaucratic pragmatism, it is now being slowly grasped and applied in the canon-revising program of progressive scholars throughout the country.19

Anticipating Intractable Paradigm-Shifts

The major obstacle to any rigorous exploration of U.S. imperialist hegemony in the Philippines inheres in the controlling paradigm of philosophical idealism (instanced in methodological individualism and empiricist functionalism) that ushered in academic disciplines addressing U.S. “exceptionalism” and legitimized their regimes of truth. I suggest that this epistemological approach hinges on a positivistic, evolutionary theory of culture–traditional patterns of conduct, norms, beliefs, attitudes, together with their corresponding practices of symbolic translation and signification–as the explanatory key to the subaltern condition of the Filipino.
That constellation of action, meaning, and habitus (in Pierre Bourdieu’s construal) also explains the production/reproduction of dependency relations now assuming more covert and deceptive disguises.20 Reduced to a few pivotal notions like hiya, internal debt (utang na loob), “mutuality of power dynamics,” and so on, culture with its complex symbolic economy is divorced from its constellation of determining forces, from the circumstantial network of power. It becomes a generalizing formula utilized to unravel affairs of extreme “thickness” and intricacy, with weighty ethical and moral resonance. The functionalism of deploying the patron-client dyad is not totally without value in shedding light on specific empirical phenomena.21 But the effects of neocolonial exploitation, racism, and gender oppression are absent, marginalized, or concealed. Lacking the historical world-system dynamics involving “asymmetrical relations” between exploitative occupier and subjugated indigenes, devoid of any sensorium for registering the unequal power relations between contending subjects who necessarily impinge on each other’s physiognomies, what we have in such accounts is nothing but a banal exercise in apologetics.
A recent example of this revisionist genre is Stanley Karnow’s In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines. Its thesis of U.S. nonculpability for its subjugation of the Philippines hinges on the notion that the Filipinos “submitted voluntarily to their own exploitation.” In context, Karnow’s performance is symptomatic of an entire reactionary backlash trying to settle accounts with the liberal conscience of the sixties and the skepticism of “third world” multitudes in the seventies. But despite rehashing tired opinions and attempting to vindicate the Anglo-Saxon “civilizing mission” for the nth time, Karnow fails to balance debits and credits. Why, after nine decades of trying to instill American values of “integrity, civic responsibility, and respect for impersonal institutions,” did the U.S. fail to remold the natives into their own idealized self-image, producing instead the horrible Marcos episode and a fertile breeding ground for communist insurgents?
Karnow’s retort is naively evasive: “History is responsible…” By acceding to the Filipino aspirations for sovereignty soon after the conquest, Karnow counsels us, the United States deflated the nationalist elan in the course of tutelage; this left the Filipinos confused, ambivalent, duplicitous. To win hearts and minds, U.S. officials accomodated to Filipino traditions, “customs and social life,” the inertia of opportunistic alliances and “coils of mutual loyalties” that characterize the “tribal texture” of Filipino life. Karnow’s argument is plain: the durable and seemingly impervious compadrazgo system, with its familial dyadic ties that imposed the patron-client grid on political relations, frustrated any intent to duplicate the ethos and productivity of the American system. Clientelism in fact brought out the worst in the fallible American administrators (including Gen. Douglas MacArthur). Thus it is not U.S. colonial subjugation but the quasifeudal ordering of Filipino society and its immutable hierarchy of values that account for the underdevelopment, corruption, and tragedies of the Philippines. What we observe here in this indictment of local mores and folkways is really “the insertion of colonial bodies into a metropolitan discourse [that] provides sanction for the politics of colonialism at the same time as it reproduces them.”22
In his perceptive review of In Our Image, Peter Tarr refutes Karnow’s spurious claim to ethical neutrality and high-mindedness. Tarr shows how the journalist has resurrected myths about the destructive dynamics of U.S.-Philippines relations, in particular how the brutal conquest of the Philippines has been more than atoned for by the benefits given to the losers: sanitation, health care, roads, schools, “honest judiciary,” and an ostensible democratic political system (what Benedict Anderson calls “cacique democracy”23)–reforms that, it is implied, Filipinos would not have attained by themselves. “A model of enlightenment” is Karnow’s phrase for the Philippine Commission’s advice to Washington to use the ilustrado elite as “transmission belts” in governing the masses, to win over the mestizo principales whose precarious and endangered position was eventually normalized by the tactical ploy of Taft’s slogan “Philippines for the Filipinos” and then entrenched as the ruling bloc in the stratified dispensation. The fable that underpins Karnow’s recuperation of imperialism with a smiling face is what Tarr calls the “Immaculate Conception myth” which mystifies the origins and motivations of U.S. foreign policy
so perspicuously described by Kolko, Williams, and others.24
Tarr’s review sharply exposes the vacuity of Karnow’s claim to an impartial reading and evaluation of the imperial record. What Tarr judiciously points out is that the so-called “atonement” Karnow recites with great zeal did not really benefit the majority of Filipinos. On the contrary, it perpetuated oppression and injustice, sharpening class and ethnic divisions through the entrenchment of oligarchic rule, from Osmena and Quezon to Roxas, Marcos and Aquino, all of them invariably supported to one degree or another by a succession of U.S. policies and administrations. This unremitting patronage culminated in the Cold War involvement of the CIA with Magsaysay’s anti-Huk campaign. And it persisted throughout the years of intervention in Indochina, Central America, Africa, and the Middle East. (For the complicity of a series of U.S. administrations with Marcos’ authoritarian rule, we have to consult other works such as Raymond Bonner’s Waltzing with a Dictator (1987), Alfred McCoy’s Priests on Trial (1984), Leonard Davis’ Revolutionary Struggle in the Philippines (1989), Thomas Churchill’s Triumph Over Marcos (1995), and the periodic reports by the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, the Permanent People’s Tribunal, and others.) It goes without saying that Karnow is a shrewd popularizer, a bricoleur of hackneyed notions and received doxa culled from the researches of mainstream scholars like David Joel Steinberg, Peter Stanley, Theodore Friend, Glenn May, and other “gate-keepers” who guard the parameters of acceptable, safe thinking on the problematic of U.S.-Philippines encounters.25

Interrogating the Archive

From a more theoretical vantage point, Karnow’s apologia tries to define the American Self via representing the Other from the Self’s ethnocentric, racializing gaze. In this process of othering, the “Filipino” becomes both an empirical referent and a construct of cross-hatched narratives, approximating the hybrid, amphibious creatures encountered in postcolonial terrain. Genealogically, Karnow’s text belongs to a massive tradition of U.S. colonial discourse purporting to supply the veracious, objectively “scientific” knowledge of the Filipino–his thoughts, feelings, behavior, even his “unconscious.” This knowledge is inscribed in the ideological apparatuses (schools, media, philanthropic organizations, sports, etc.) necessary to maintain sustainable hegemony in the Philippines and justify the prophylaxis of periodic intervention to the tax-paying public.
Of about a dozen texts that have invented and disseminated the received “truths” about the Philippines and Filipinos, texts central to the constitution of the disciplinary field called “Philippine Studies” (a residual legacy of Cold War “area studies”), one may cite three that are acknowledged to be influential in crafting state policies and fabricating mass consensus: W. Cameron Forbes, The Philippine Islands (1924); Joseph Hayden, The Philippines: A Study in National Development (1942); and George Taylor, The Philippines and the United States: Problems of Partnership (1964), the latter serving as the Cold War primer and baedeker. These canonical texts were preceded by James A. LeRoy, Philippine Life in Town and Country (1905) and Dean C. Worcester, The Philippines Past and Present (1914). Aside from accumulating, tabulating, and systematizing a vast amount of statistics and raw data, these texts (in particular Hayden and Taylor) are foundational reference points for a corps of specialists I call “Filipinologists.” They endeavor to organize and integrate a large body of information and ideas by using the accepted Eurocentric theories of culture and society found in mainstream social sciences. When applied by appointed functionaries and instrumentalized by the ideological apparatuses of the state, this official body of knowledge and its corresponding administrative translation serves to legitimate the logic and efficacy of U.S. rule. The key idea of “tutelage,” a signal marker of evolutionistic positivism invested in this archive, is captured in this succinct formulation of David Joel Steinberg: “…the U.S. policy of self-liquidating colonialism, in which the ‘little brown brother’ was permitted to achieve independence when he grew up, a maturation process that took forty-five years.”26
Together with other institutional apparatuses, these texts of legitimation constructed the object of knowledge and exercised mastery over it. They were in turn authorized by a whole panoply of regulations (economic, political, cultural), at once hortatory and conciliating, governing the relations between the United States as a colonizing sovereignty and the subjugated inhabitants of the territory once administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. What is more insidious is that this archive has also profoundly conditioned the configuration of people-to-people relations in everyday life, sanctioning patterns of deliberation and decision-making that reproduced stereotypes and “common sense.” It also reinforced a world-view that tended to repress critical thinking and deny creative autonomy by circumscribing if not proscribing possibilities of change within certain fixed boundaries of the public sphere which are always under surveillance by an elaborate network of policing (internal and external) mechanisms. “Philippine Studies” is the rubric for the ideological machine that facilitated the shaping of Karnow’s text and others fulfilling hegemonic tasks.
Notwithstanding their authors’ claims to objectivity, all these texts have now been compromised by the reality of seemingly ineradicable social injustice, unmitigated poverty of millions, rampant atrocities by the military, exploitation of women and children, and widespread violation of human rights by business and government. Aspects of this reality have been exposed by concerned Filipinos (see, for example, Hernando Abaya’s expose of the shady deals of General Douglas MacArthur and Paul McNutt in his autobiography)–proof that subalterns can speak if not fully represent themselves.27
Now the theme of “imperial collaboration” between the Filipino elite and U.S. bureaucrats has been a recurrent leitmotif in the archive of U.S. diplomacy since Forbes’s two-volume inventory of U.S. achievements. Hayden schematized the replication of subalternity by the time of the Commonwealth period (1935-40) while Taylor streamlined its analytic of norms to fit Cold War geopolitics. With the influence of Taylor’s book at the height of the Korean War and the anti-Huk campaigns of Lansdale-Magsaysay, the official routine of knowledge-production about the Filipino began that applied a more systematic culturalist grid on laboratory specimens labelled “Filipino character and social practices.”
The procedure of truth-making is simple. The culture of one sector, the dominant landlord-merchant class, is taken as the normative consensus model for understanding the whole formation. Functionalism in its empiricist and positivist version was thoroughly mobilized for hegemonic purposes (a good illustration is Jean Grossholtz’s Politics in the Philippines [1964] ) . The structural-functionalist deployment of notions like hiya, utang na loob, and pakikisama or “smooth interpersonal relations” propagated by Frank Lynch, George Guthrie, John Carroll, Mary Hollnsteiner, Chester Hunt, and their disciples became the approved operational paradigm for explaining any event or relationship, say, Quezon’s duplicity, Marcos’ tactics toward Benigno Aquino, President Corazon Aquino’s incapacity to reform or discipline her kins, the psychology of disaffected members of the New People’s Army, and practically all aspects of Philippine politics and society. The imperative is to maintain and buttress social equilibrium. One recent example is Claude Buss’s Cory Aquino and the People of the Philippines whose refrain echoes a now predictable reflex of scapegoating: “the Filipinos found it hard to break the habit of special dependence on the United States.”28 This may be a slight improvement over the old rhetoric of conceiving the whole country as “a penal reformatory,” an enlarged Iwahig underpinning the “logic of the carcereal continuum”29 that has structured the peculiar symbiosis between the two countries since 1898.
Reason yields to the exigencies of governance, universality to historical contingency. Given the renewed threat of Filipino nationalism to expunge once and for all the myth of U.S.-Philippines “special relations,” the desideratum of contemporary U.S. knowledge-production about the Philippines (as demonstrated by the works of David Steinberg, Theodore Friend, and Peter Stanley, among others) is to re-conceptualize the fact of U.S. domination as a transaction of equal partnership between Filipinos and Americans. It is essentially an interpretive strategy to revise the canonical emplotment of a Saxonified mission civilizatrice. This project of revaluation, what I would call a post-hoc-ergo rationalization to underscore its retrograde instrumentalism, would center on a refurbishing of the patron-client paradigm; the notion of reciprocal obligations entailed by it would arguably serve as the theoretical framework within which one can then exorcise the burden of U.S. responsibility for what happened in the Philippines from 1898 on by ascribing the cause of the failure of American tutelage to the putative shrewdness of Filipinos in “manipulating” their masters.
We tried to do our best, but…. This is the basic thesis of Peter Stanley’s A Nation in the Making: The Philippines and the United States, 1899-1921 (1974), an updated sequel to the family of metanarratives cited earlier. It is an argument recycled by Karnow and other commentaries before and after the February 1986 insurrection. A dialectical twist of historical sensibility seems to have occurred. The sharp contrast between these reconstructive texts and previous works critical of U.S. imperialism–to cite only the most accessible, James Blount’s The American Occupation of the Philippines (1912); Leon Wolff’s Little Brown Brother (1961); William Pomeroy, American Neocolonialism (1970); Stephen Shalom, The United States and the Philippines: A Study of Neocolonialism (1981); and Stuart Creighton Miller’s “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines 1899-1903 (1982)–may be read as symptomatic of a cleavage in the hegemonic consensus. This requires a change of tactics attuned to recent realignments of political agencies and the reactionary climate now ascendant since the mid-seventies. It can also be conceived as a defensive mechanism set into play to counter a resurgent anti-U.S. hegemonism around the world in the wake of the Vietnam defeat and the revolutionary ruptures in Central America, South Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere. This mutation needs to be clarified because of its impact on contemporary cultural studies and the conduct of intellectuals in both metropolis and periphery.
The agenda of the present neoconservative trend in Philippine studies in the U.S. academy is geared chiefly to the task of redefining U.S.-Philippines putative “special relations” by downplaying the power of American imperial governance. In the process, scholars enlarge the role of the Filipino elite in order to convert “empire” into an evolutionary experiment in “tutelage,” shifting the onus of accountability to the victims.
In reviewing a volume edited by Peter Stanley entitled Reappraising an Empire, New Perspectives on Philippine-American History (1984), Robert Stauffer acutely points to the dogmatic ideological framework of the new apologetics, a variant of neoWeberian Parsonian sociology. He isolates the theoretical basis of this trend in the inflation of the concept of patron-client dyad based on reciprocal obligations. This conceptual framework ignores the world-systems approach (developed and refined in the last two decades) that predicates dependency on unequal exchange. Why? Because such a cogent alternative theory would rule out the patron-client schema of explanation since dependency excludes reciprocity. Stauffer contends that Stanley and like-minded Filipinologists romanticize the relation of “collaborative elites” and colonizers; they give “a Victorian legitimacy to past conquests and in so doing justify–[by demonstrating how satisfactory are the relations between Filipinos and Americans, e.g. Lansdale and Magsaysay]–future imperial ventures.”30 Further, by reducing all relations to that of patron-client over and above the context of sharpening class and other sectoral divisions, the proponents of the “collaborative empire” give the impression that such relations are permanent.
It is clear that the revisionary thrust of scholars employing the patron-client model aims to recast the exploitative relationship of dependency into a reciprocal one where responsibility is equalized if not dispersed. By downplaying any serious U.S. influence on Philippine social structures and inflating the ingenious duplicity of the colonized, Stauffer argues that Stanley and his colleagues make “empire” into a romantic ideology.
From this angle, one can understand Stanley’s partisanship in openly espousing a program of exoneration: “…it is a hubristic illusion for Americans to imagine that, in the colonial era, they liberalized, modernized, or, for that matter, exploited the Philippines in any large, systemic, or lasting way.” 31 That is of course disingenuous. Since a seemingly immutable patron-client pattern of relationship determined political life during U.S. ascendancy, Filipino nationalism is relegated to the “manipulative underside of the collaborative empire,” with the oxymoron of “collaborative empire” recuperating McKinley’s “benevolent assimilation” proclamation, the tropological matrix of U.S. rule over the island colony. In retrospect, one can describe this new “civilizing mission”–a phrase evoking the period of a socioeconomic transition from European mercantilism to a new international division of labor subtending capital’s strategy of “counterrevolution,” to use Arno Mayer’s term32 –as the ideological impetus behind the march of Anglo-Saxon progress over the conquered territories and subjugated bodies of African slaves, American Indians, Mexicans, Chinese workers, and so on, from the erection of the pilgrim settlements to the closing of the western frontier at the end of the nineteenth century.

The Exception and the Rule

The United States as a political formation is “exceptional,” according to Establishment historians, because it did not follow the European path to colonial expansion. The discourse and practice of “American exceptionalism” as part of Cold War strategy has been criticized acutely in the sixties as an outgrowth of technocratic modernization and developmentalist thought. Commenting on U.S. scholarly trends concerning China at that time, Leigh and Richard Kagan noted the privileging of cultural values and the socio-cultural system as the key to shaping an economic-political environment “conducive to the dominance of middle-class American values…American culturalism denotes the intent to rule the world by the imposition of her values, safeguarding them when necessary by military occupation and colonization.”33 This neoWeberian one-sided emphasis on value-orientation informs and vitiates such anthologies as David Rosenberg’s Marcos and Martial Law in the Philippines (1979), John Bresnan’s Crisis in the Philippines (1986), and Patricio Abinales’ The Revolution Falters (1996).
Despite its weakness and for lack of any substitute, this culturalist functionalist paradigm still exercises authority among Filipinologists and their followers. It has now been thoroughly exposed for the following inadequacies, among others: its one-sided attribution of rationality and normative equilibrium to a particular social arrangement, its dismissal of the complex intentionality of individual’s (agent’s) conduct, and its circular mode of explaining social activity as meaningful insofar as it fulfills a temporally limited normative need such as the reinforcement of a code of values required for social coherence. In sum, structural functionalism pivots around a subjectivist concern with values divorced from the social relations of production, from the historical matrix of social actors in a specific milieu. It posits a static, ahistorical view of society removed from its interdependency in a dynamic world-system and its ceaseless transformations.
Anthony Giddens has argued that identifying a functional need of a system has no explanatory value at all.34 Aside from ascribing a teleological quality to a social system whose parts perform functional roles, it attributes to a given political set-up a higher degree of cohesion and stability than what the facts warrant; indeed, it occludes dissonant and disintegrative factors at work. Because it cannot really provide a comprehensive explanation for the intentional activity of agents and for the unintended consequences that result from purposive actions, functionalism of the kind employed by Karnow and his sources distorts and reifies Filipino character, society, and history. It can only prejudge the actions of the Sakdals and the Huks as factional deviations from the oligarchic norm even if it concedes to them a modicum of moral credence. It dismisses the ideas of Filipino nationalists (always labelled “extreme” or “ultra” if not demonized altogether) in general as inexplicable in terms of the homeostatic imperatives of the status quo, or simply the “manipulative underside of the collaborative empire.”
We can now grasp the rationale for Karnow’s deployment of the patron-client formula to give a semblance of intelligibility to imperial “aberrations.” By focusing not just on Filipinos as equal participants but on their ability to “manipulate” their masters, Karnow, together with Stanley and other progenitors, endorse the putative evangelizing mission of the colonizers and their definition of a conflict taking place on conquered soil, effectively obscuring if not erasing U.S. responsibility for the ravages of capital accumulation. Karnow’s montage of close-up scenes of action begets the illusion of valorizing personal intentions but, in actual fact, the technique subordinates agency to structural constraints dictated by systemic inertia. The result seems paradoxical: values drive human agents, but ultimately “fate” supervenes. That “fate” is what our experts want to ignore: the political economy of the market, the conflict of labor and capital. Trapped by the theoretical naivete and internal incoherence of their approach, Karnow and his colleagues cannot remedy the legitimation crisis of American interventionism. What they have contrived so far, a containment strategy for Filipino nationalism, survives today in the ruins of the welfare state and the pax Americana that once reigned over the anticommunist “free world.”35
Karnow’s book should then be appraised within its specific sociopolitical conjuncture. His tendentious summary of over eighty years of diligent archival labor to understand the dynamics of U.S. involvement in the Philippines has yielded only what the aforementioned classics of “Philippine Studies” have repeatedly posited: the effort to Americanize the Filipinos partly succeeded in terms of introducing the forms of institutions like electoral democracy, mass public education, and so forth; but it completely failed in altering traditional “Filipino” values, in particular those sanctioning the patron-client tributary relationship and its effects. (Except perhaps in the case of Filipina women in which the Victorian ethos of domesticity enforced by the capitalist division of labor herded women back from the public sphere to housekeeping.) In brief, as Roxanne Lynn Doty argues, the Philippines continued to be represented by imperial ideological practice (U.S. State Department reports, U.S. official pronouncements and their academic counterparts) as a realm of irrational passion, chaos, internal disorder, corruption, and inefficiency to which only the “disciplinary technology” of counterinsurgency (if the surveillance of legal apparatuses for securing consent fails) can be the appropriate remedy. Lacking agency, the “uncivilized” Filipinos from the gaze of U.S. administrators cannot enjoy full, positive sovereignty. 36
In the light of the traumatic Marcos interregnum and the persistence of national-democractic resistance, this legitimation crisis of U.S. hegemony may be said to frame all inquiries into U.S.-Philippines relations. It is a condition of possibility for constructing the object of knowledge called “Philippine Studies.” From the end of World War II up to the nineties, “Philippine Studies” has evolved as part of the worldwide strategy of containing the Soviet Union and its “satellites.” Two commentators, Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, inscribe the role of U.S. historians and experts on the “third world” in the instrumentalization of the humanities and social science research; among others, “Philippine Studies” during the Cold War assumed U.S. foreign policy as “identical with peace and freedom.” From another angle, the paradox can be explained by Giovanni Arrighi’s comment that “global ‘decolonization’ has been the most significant correlate of U.S. hegemony” and its accomodation of certain nationalisms within “free trade imperialism.” 37
Karnow’s tendentious chronicle forms part of this Cold War arsenal to sanitize the zones of contention between the “Evil Empire” and the “free world” under U.S. patronage. Conceived as one ideological weapon mobilized for the post-Marcos era of mending “fences” and “bridges,” it is symptomatic not only of the U.S. Establishment’s need to redefine periodically its global mission in the context of international rivalries, especially in the light of its economic decline, but also of the urge to rewrite the past–precisely to represent many “other” wills and events purged from the official records–in order to define the “American Self” anew. Since the dogma of white supremacy is deeply embedded in all Western discourse, this act of U.S. self-definition operates within that episteme and seeks mainly to recover lost ground. Theodore Friend (1989), for instance, shifts the blame to the “Hispanic tradition” for all the social ills afflicting the Philippines.38 NeoWeberian culturalism and residual anticommunism underpin such remarks. Meanwhile, rehashing the cliche of an exotic and “uncivilized” territory, Alan Berlow’s investigative reporting of killings in Negros, Dead Season (1996) “captures the dynamics of an entire culture: one mired in atavistic rules and the tangled legacy of colonialism,” according to the publisher’s blurb. Like Karnow and many other “instant” experts on the Philippines, Berlow was assigned in the late eighties by National Public Radio to report on the Philippines. Karnow’s discourse can be perceived as the latest in a long series of recuperative strategies to represent the Filipino people as a reflection of Anglo-American “manifest destiny” in its ongoing metamorphosis, particularly urgent at this conjuncture when U.S. ascendancy has eroded and the threat of other capitalist blocs opens the possibility of a reactionary if not fascist and decadent solution.

What is to be undone?

In 1947, the great historical-materialist philosopher Karl Korsch turned his attention to the new form of imperialist control being set up in the Philippines based on puppets, Quislings, and variegated collaborators, with the concession of political independence being used to increase economic and social dependence. In general, Korsch observed that Western colonization violently disrupted “all the traditional living habits in the indigenous community,” but the mounting of the anticommunist crusade led by the U.S. ruling bloc after World War II resurrected the nineteenth-century slogan of “tutelage” (if somewhat more coercive and treacherous) for benighted natives in order to camouflage the neocolonial stratagem. Aside from repudiating the spurious rationale of “tutelage,” Korsch points to the degeneration of ideology (white supremacy, apartheid) into fascist barbarism when it “loses practical validity.”39 CIA and U.S. counterinsurgency measures diluted with Agency for International Development (U.S. AID), Peace Corps, and assorted NGOs confirm the veracity of this insight from the Magsaysay administration to those of Marcos, Aquino, and Ramos.40
From the beginning, as I have suggested earlier, the entire disciplinary apparatus of U.S. knowledge-production has been organized to provide an explanation for such eventuality. Challenged by mounting popular resistance from the late sixties on, the rationale for U.S. support of the Marcos dictatorship–from Nixon to Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush–for almost three decades has drawn its logic and rhetoric from the scholarship of American historians, political scientists, sociologists, and functionaries in various disciplines. Complicit with state policies since the advent of Empire in late nineteenth century, this archive of U.S. ideological self-validation is now being reconceived as a postcolonial phenomenon, with Filipino agency being discovered in the gaps and silences of intertextual discourse and practices. After a hundred years of producing knowledge of the “Filipino” (in the generic sense), is the postcolonial fiction of the hybrid, ambivalent, syncretic subject all there is to celebrate? Is the Filipino intellectual’s position one of hybridity, “part of the colonized by ancestry while aligning with the colonizer by franchise,” and therefore complicitous? Is the Filipino from this angle simultaneously an artifice of subjugation and resistance? Is she a transcultural freak amalgamating Asia and the West, the civilized Self and the others, and other polarities?41
Proposed by postmodernist critics, this hypothetical positionality or nexus of subject-positions is tied to the larger problematic of utilitarian pluralism. It is entailed by the logic of pragmatic individualism whereby a stratified and hierarchically ordered polity is legitimized whenever the terms “freedom” and “democracy” are brandished. Multiculturalism is the name of the official language-game acceptable to the state. “Difference” in the asymmetrical marketplace after all is what constitutes the dominant mode of U.S. self-identification, a disciplinary mode of agency-formation whose reifying power seems infinite until it encounters the refusal of the outcast, the pariah, the “lazy native,” the “terrorist” and communist–enemies of the “American Way of Life.” Toleration of those who differ, the strangers or aliens, is allowed so long as they stay within bounds.42 “Hybridity” is a term that one can choose or reject. But the central issue is: what is the actual balance of power relations and access to resources in which we find ourselves imbricated? This is the crucial question that remains bracketed and “unspoken” even while postmodern deconstructionists claim to challenge and unsettle everything.
Given the predominance of elite careerism and other varieties of petit-bourgeois opportunism among postcolonials, I am afraid the inventory of ourselves that Antonio Gramsci once prescribed as a preliminary heuristic imperative might take some time to accomplish.43 Meanwhile, what I think can be reaffirmed is the attitude of being conscious and critical of one’s framework as a point of departure, predisposed to analyzing events in terms of their multiple determinants and extrapolating the network of internal relations that comprise their differentiated and overdetermined unity. I would urge here a critical orientation geared to historicizing and cognitively demarcating the limits of theory (vis-a-vis social practices and forms of life) and assigning responsibility. In this way, the praxis of producing knowledge–one inevitably asks for what purpose? and for whom?–recognizes its multiple determinants, its condition of possibility, in the terrain of popular struggles across class, gender, “race,” nationality, and so on. Thus we come to understand the process whereby the knower becomes an integral part of the known; the educator is educated, to rehearse the old adage, when reading/writing ceases to be an end in itself and coincides with the act of transforming and transvaluing the world.
The acquisition of such a critical sensibility, transgressive and radically utopian at the same time, is an arduous task for the excolonized sensibility. What any subject of neocolonial bondage faces in this attempt to liberate her psyche from the temptations of servility has been intimated by the great Caribbean revolutionary thinker C.L.R. James when he discerned how the myth of white/Western supremacy, now become an organic part of postcolonial doctrine, is so difficult to disgorge: “It is not that the myth is not challenged. It is, but almost always on premises that it has itself created, premises that (as with all myths) rest on very deep foundations within the society that has created them.”44 Demystification of idols and their dethronement then becomes the first order of the day.
Historical experience teaches us that some idols may last as long as finance capitalism (now mediated through the World Bank/International Monetary Fund) survives its periodic and ineluctable crisis. In the spectrum of reactions to the terror of white supremacy, the most common one (in the Philippines) seems to be the nativist glorification of traditional pieties, archaic customs, and tributary rituals, often labelled by well-intentioned educators as “Filipino values.” These values are then privileged to be what distinguishes the organic community of the rural countryside, a locus of affection refigured as the authentic homeland counterposed to the alienating, diabolic, and strife-torn postindustrial cities. This type of “nationalism” is understandable but scarcely defensible. Of late that essentialism has given way to the cult of the hybrid and aleatory, the indeterminate and in-between–in short, the decentered subject.45 In this disaggregated milieu, should we Filipinos then make a virtue of the neocolonial predicament, celebrating our fractured identities and disintegrated histories as our avant-garde sublime? Disavowing the perils of essentialism and the proverbial “grand narratives,” we sometimes succumb to the sirens of anomie and jouissance in our endeavor to affirm our dignity, our autochtonous tradition, our right to self-determination. There is something intriguing in the characteristic gesture of “postcolonized” intellectuals embracing their schizoid fate as a virtue, at best a springboard for future nomadic quests. On the other hand, the transnational corporate system invariably proves clever enough to utilize this posture of sophistication to promote self-commodifying ventures and the reifying aura of spectacles. 46
Before concluding, I want to interpose a necessary digression here, a hiatus that bridges the dilemma of Filipinos who have settled in the United States and the predicament of their brothers/sisters at home. The chief distinction of Filipinos from other Asians domiciled here is that their country of origin was the object of violent colonization by U.S. finance capital. It is this foundational event, not the fabled presence in Louisiana of Filipino fugitives from the Spanish galleons, that establishes the limit and potential of the Filipino lifeworld. Without understanding the complex process of colonial subjugation and the internalization of dependency, Filipinos will not be able to define their own specific historical trajectory here as a bifurcated formation–one based on the continuing struggle of Filipinos for national liberation and popular democracy in the Philippines, and the other based on the exploitation and resistance of immigrants here (from the “Manongs” in Hawaii and the West Coast to the post-1965 “brain drain” and the present diaspora worldwide). These two distinct but syncopated histories, while geographically separate, flow into each other and converge into a single multilayered narrative that needs to be articulated around the principles of national sovereignty, social justice, and equality (see my book From Exile to Diaspora). So far this narrative has not been fully grasped and enunciated; mainstream sociologists have distorted it to suit the assimilationist dogma while poststructualists have conjured the image of the Filipino as transmigrant to muddle the atmosphere already mired by free-floating signifiers, contingency, aporia, ambivalence, indeterminacy, liminality, and so on. What could be more muddled than the notion that all nation-states are equal in power and status, making the newly-arrived Filipina “transmigrant” indistinguishable from the white American middle-class suburbanite?
To avoid the “nihilism of despair or Utopia of progress,” we are advised to be transnational, or else. What this means is to perform non-stop minstrelsy to gratify the nostalgic essentialism of those in power born long after the glorious days of Empire, to assume the role of schizoid or ambidextrous entertainers–Bienvenido Santos’s “you lovely people.” This program of trying to assume a hybrid “postcolonial” visage, with all its fetishized exoticism and auratic magic, only reinforces the liberal consensus of utlitarianism and entrepreneurial rationality. Like ludic multiculturalism, this notion of transmigrancy obfuscates imperial oppression and the imperative of revolution. It sustains by glamorizing the marginalization and dependency of neocolonized peoples. It erases what David Harvey calls historical “permanences” and their dialectical supersession.47 It aggravates the invidious Othering of people of color into racialized minorities–cheap labor for transnational business, “mail order” brides, domestics, and so on. It rejects their histories of resistance and their agency for emancipating themselves from the laws of the market and its operational ideology of patriarchal white supremacy. So much then for transmigrancy, and back to the real world.
The legacy of classic colonialism and its delayed effects–three hundred years under Spain, almost a century under the United States (compounded by the disastrous Japanese Occupation of World War II)–has proved devastating, exorbitant, even incommensurable from the standard Enlightenment criteria. In the twilight days of the Marcos dictatorship, Filipino senator Jose W. Diokno remarked that almost a century of U.S. (neo)colonialism “failed to understand the need to change our economic and social structure to produce a viable Filipino independent nation.” What resulted was a subaltern state without sovereignty, with an authoritarian government pretending to be democratic, a missing or absent nation “in a rich land filled with poor people.”48 Approximating the nightmare of the Filipino-American War, the Filipino postcolonial sublime may be said to crystallize in the banality of daily humiliation, suffering, and injustice suffered by the majority of 70 million citizens today. Not surprisingly, U.S. Filipinologists are unable to generate knowledge of this everyday “trivial” phenomenon, much less keep track of its vicissitudes.
Aside from widespread poverty–in the eighties, the Philippines was often lumped with Bangladesh as the poorest country in the world–Filipinos are the second most malnourished people in the whole world despite the country being a top producer and exporter of food, minerals, and labor power, one of the most vital resources for transnational capital: about 6 million Filipino OCWs satisfy the needs of the world for cheap semi-skilled nonunionized labor with destructive implications for the health of women, families, and entire communities.49 Given the rising unemployment, inflation and high prices for basic foods, lack of capital goods industries, corruption in government, and an onerous foreign debt, the immediate prospect for amelioration of the lot of the majority is practically nil. Especially in the wake of the collapse of the Asian “tigers” (South Korea and Thailand) as well as Indonesia, the IMF/World Bank schemes of deregulation and privatization pursued by the Philippine government are bound to worsen the plight of ordinary working people and deepen the destitution all around.
The major source of political and economic inequality in Filipino society, all recent studies concur, is the control of land and other resources by an oligarchic minority–the chief middlemen and “transmission belt” of U.S. neocolonial rule–who also manipulate the bureaucracy, the legislature, courts, and the military in order to preserve their power and privileges. State power in a disarticulated formation like the Philippines encroaches deep into the trenches and ramparts of civil society; consequently, the sphere of civil society–private life and ego-centered interests–cannot be considered an inviolable refuge of domestic peace and liberty.50 It is primarily owing to U.S. support of this parasitic and moribund elite since the turn of the century that millions of Filipinos, according to one human rights lawyer, “will never forget that it was U.S. tanks, guns, bullets, bombs, planes and even chemicals that the Philippine military used to kill them.”51 U.S.-sponsored “low intensity” warfare (initiated by the Reagan administration and fostered by its successors) proceeds without much impediment. In the aftermath of the removal of U.S. bases, Senator Wigberto Tanada warned us recently: “Despite the demise of the Cold War, ship visits by nuclear-armed U.S. naval vessels continue to make port calls in the Philippines. [With secret official agreements we anticipate] continued U.S. military access to Philippine territory, despite the clear-cut prohibition against this kind of deployment of foreign forces by the Philippine Constitution.”52 The only Asian territory annexed by the United States in 1898, with an ensemble of communities that has been undergoing profound social and political transformations for a century, the Philippines today exemplifies a dis-integrated socioeconomic formation in which the major contradictions of our time–antagonistic forces embodying the categories of class, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion, sexuality, and so on–converge into a fissured and disjunctive panorama open for interpretation, critique, and ecumemical exchanges. But can U.S. knowledge-production of the traditional kind, whose performance and achievement cannot be dissociated from its complicity with imperial capital, ever succeed in confronting what it has produced or comprehend the dialectic of material forces that is its condition of possibility, its raison d’etre?

8. Claude Buss, Cory Aquino and the People of the Philippines (Stanford: Stanford Alumni Association, 1987) and Richard Kessler, Rebellion and Repression in the Philippines (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

9. For an eyewitness account of the advent of U.S. power in the Philippines, see Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Filipino Martyrs (London: The Bodley Head, 1900, reprinted in Quezon City by Malaya Books, 1970).

10. For the post-Cold War global realignments, see Phyllis Bennis and Michael Moushabeck, eds., Altered States: A Reader in the New World Order (New York: Olive Branch Press, 1993).

13. Mark Twain, “Thirty Thousand Killed a Million,” The Atlantic Monthly (April 1992), 62. For Twain’s anti-imperialism, see the numerous works of Jim Zwick, among them: “An Empire Is Not a Frontier: Mark Twain’s Opposition to United States Imperialism,” Over Here: Review in American Studies (Summer and Winter 1995): 58-70; see also Jim Zwick, ed., Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992).

14. Albert Beveridge, “Our Philippine Policy,” in The Philippines Reader edited by Daniel Schirmer and Steve Shalom (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 23. For a historical overview, see Teodoro Agoncillo and Oscar Alfonso, History of the Filipino People (Quezon City: Malaya Books, 1967); Renato Constantino, A History of the Philippines (New York: Monthly Review, 1975), and also William Chapman, Inside the Philippine Revolution (Quezon City: Ken Incorporated, 1987).

17. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1967).

18. Gabriel Kolko, Main Currents in Modern American History (New York: Pantheon, 1976), 42, 286-87.

19. Revisionist historians have suggested that the predicament of the “institutional invisibility” of Philippine studies is a result of the absence of any serious discussion of imperial American “exceptionalism” in the academy. Everyone knows that American scholars of Philippine affairs occupy a marginal or subordinate slot as a function of the low geopolitical status of the Philippines in the U.S. global profit-making horizon, a status fixed earlier by the successful hegemonic scheme of “Filipinization.” [On “Filipinization,” consult Ruby Paredes, ed., Philippine Colonial Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Center for International and Area Studies, 1988).] This astute cooptative scheme implemented by William Howard Taft, first civil governor of the colony, may indeed be taken as the originary inspiration for the current vogue of holding the victims responsible for their plight; the most recent example is Glenn Anthony May’s debunking of the Filipino “mythmakers” responsible for the cult of the Filipino revolutionary hero Andres Bonifacio in his book Inventing a Hero (Quezon City: New Day Press, 1996).
However, I do not think that this minor status of American Filipinologists involves simply the question of representation whether political, semiotic, or ethnographic. I believe that the structural cause has something to do with this persistent failure to critique the process of U.S. hegemonic rule in the Philippines celebrated by Karnow, Fred Eggan (“The Philippines in the Twentieth Century: A Study in Contrasts,” Review in Anthropology 21 [1991], 13-23), and others, due to the nature of their training and the apologetic mission of the discipline. This is compounded with the usual compensatory reward in the metropolitan expert gaining mastery over “others” that is so integral a part of Western racist hegemony.

20. This value-centered research has been criticized by, among others, Virgilio Enriquez, From Colonial to Liberation Psychology: the Philippine Experience (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1992) and George Weightman, “Sociology in the Philippines,” International Review of Modern Sociology 17 (Spring 1987), 35-62. Despite the decades that have passed since the foundational texts of Forbes, Hayden, and Taylor, not to mention the workings of an entire range of ideological apparatuses in school and media, we find old categories and a whole repertoire of tropes and syllogisms still validated in a plethora of books on the February 1986 insurrection. These journalistic productions have tried to exploit the commercial opportunity opened by that conjuncture–another testimony to the commodifying reach of capitalist mass communication. Most of these works, however, are flawed by the naive adoption of the functionalist/empiricist paradigm that claims to represent the “truth” of the dense, multilayered experience of millions of workers and peasants victimized by U.S-Philippines “special relations.”

21. Further refinements have been introduced by Benedict Kerkvliet in theorizing the everyday micropolitics of resistance in a Philippine village at the expense of erasing the historical totality of social relations; see his Everyday Politics in the Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Various writers have supplemented the normative analysis with electic approaches, as evinced by the contributions in Benedict Kerkvliet and Resil Mojares, eds., From Marcos to Aquino (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1991.

23. Benedict Anderson, “Cacique Democracy in the Philippines: Origins and Dreams,” New Left Review 169 (May-June 1988), 3-33. The inadequacy of Anderson’s speculations on “imagined communities” is discussed by Renato Rosaldo, “Social justice and the crisis of national communities,” in Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen (New York: St. Martins Press, 1994), 239-252.
Employing a Foucauldean approach, Reynaldo Ileto argues against a developmentalist linear approach which underwrites “nationalist” historiography (such as Anderson’s) because the privileging of nationalist actors suppresses their binary opposites (bandits, millenarians, etc.); see his “Outlines of a Nonlinear Emplotment of Philippine History,” in David Lloyd and Lisa Low, eds., The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 98-130. The exposure of modernization or developmentalism has been going on for a long time now; a poststructuralist example is Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). The genealogical method is quite recent. But as Jurgen Habermas (in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1987) and other critics of Foucault have pointed out, this antimodernist view is internally incoherent and subjectivist, caught in a dualistic metaphysics of subject-object the material-historical context of which it cannot grasp, thus reproducing all the antinomies it originally seeks to transcend. Such a nonlinear populist history can only elaborate the pathos of victimage in pursuit of an exclusivist anarchist utopia or nihilism, as Bryan Palmer suggests in Descent Into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). See also: Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration (New York: Verso, 1987); J. G. Merquior, From Prague to Paris (London: Verso, 1986), and Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989).
For a response to the populist historiography of Ileto, Nemenzo, and others, see Jim Richardson, “Review Article,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 23 (1993), 382-395.

25. In the vanguard of this reactionary Filipinology is Glenn May whose aforementioned book castigates the mythmaking conspiracy of Filipino historians and scholars and in the process debunks Bonifacio as a nationalist hero. On the surface, the professor claims that he is not trying to attack the accomplishments of Bonifacio or his stature; rather, he is trying to expose the alleged shenanigans and fraud of scholars as Epifanio de los Santos, Agoncillo, and others. True enough, except that his doubts and suspicions about authenticity of certain documents ascribed to Bonifacio, his reservations about the honesty and competence of Filipino historians, and of course his view about the total gullibility of the Filipino public (not only the educated intelligentsia but also the ordinary folk) accumulate a suasive force that not only the hermeneutic skills of certain individuals are questioned but also the moral character and integrity of a whole people. If Filipinos like the esteemed historians May accuses are wanting in integrity and honesty, then Bonifacio turns out to be a product of liars and forgers and the whole society as accomplices and accessories to the fraud. We owe Prof. May this unsolicited service of setting us marching along the straight course of historical veracity. But is the professor himself a neutral value-free agent of empirical objectivity? Is his choice of investigating the whole subject a professional one, or is it a program motivated by more than personal reasons. The conflicted and contentious relation between a neocolony and the imperial power can be dismissed by Prof. May, but it will not ignore him. So then we realize that the “special relation” of the Philippines and the United States that persisted smoothly through the Cold War period and survived the days of the Feb. 1986 “people power” uprising is being critically examined again the midst of a resurgent revolutionary development. This critique extends to the “interested” function of scholars like May, a function that is more part of the problem than of the solution. Of interest is May’s own assessment of “Philippine Studies”: “The State of Philippine-American Studies,” A Past Recovered (Quezon City: New Day, 1987).

26. David J. Steinberg, The Philippines: A Singular and A Plural Place (Boulder: Westview Press, 1982), 50. With appropriate adjustments, the canonical paradigm underwrites assessments as disparate as these two texts: William H. Sullivan, “The United States-Philippine Strategic Relationship,” in Carl Lande, ed., Rebuilding A Nation (Washington DC: Washington Institute Press Book, 1987), 539-546, and Paul D. Hutchcroft, “Unraveling the Past in the Philippines,” Current History (December 1995), 430-434.

27. Hernando Abaya, The Making of a Subversive (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1984); see also Ed de la Torre, Touching Ground, Taking Root (London: British Council of Churches, 1986); Delia D. Aguilar, The Feminist Challenge (Manila: Asian Social Institute, 1988); Ligaya Lindio-McGovern, Filipino Peasant Women (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).
Lest I be accused of chauvinism or xenophobia, I hasten to state here that I don’t subscribe to the view that accounts by Filipino scholars are more authentic and trustworthy just because they are “insiders.” That would be patently false because numerous Filipinos claiming nationalist credentials have openly worked for CIA/Cold War outfits like Operation Brotherhood in Vietnam, U.S.-AID, Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement, and other fronts. Recent works by Putzel, Boyce, and others are examples of excellent critical analysis that provide a wider and deeper comprehension of what is going on than the apologetic texts I have mentioned. An earlier monograph by Robert Stauffer can be cited here as a brilliant model of concrete historical analysis: The Marcos Regime: Failure of Transnational Developmentalism and Hegemony Building from Above and Outside. Research Monograph No. 23. Sydney, Australia: Transnational Corporations Research Project, 1985.

28. Claude Buss, Cory Aquino and the People of the Philippines (Stanford: Stanford Alumni Association, 1987), 143. Buss’ intervention recalls the philanthropic mission of Agnes Newton Keith in the time of Magsaysay; see her Bare Feet in the Palace (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1955).

29. Michael Salman, “Nothing Without Labor: Penology, Discipline and Independence in the Philippines Under United States Rule,” in Discrepant Histories (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 122.

31. No more explicit whitewashing of the past and defense of the status quo can be found from an Establishment scribe than that asserted belief. Peter Stanley, A Nation in the Making: The Philippines and the United States, 1899-1921 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 2.

32. Arno Mayer, Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870-1956 (New York: Harper, 1971). The real political import of the trend diagnosed here has to be calculated in the context of ongoing “low-intensity warfare” in the Philippines and in the “third world,” as discussed by Michael Klare and Peter Kornbluh, eds., Low Intensity Warfare (Quezon City: Ken Incorporated, 1989).
For a dissenting view of the Sakdal and Huk rebellions, see Leonard Davis, 36-42, 47. Another antithesis to the mainstream reduction of the “Other” may be exemplified in Leon Wolff’s reference to how Gen. Lawton was killed by the Filipino general Licerio Geronimo in an encounter on December 18, 1899: “The nemesis of Geronimo the Apache, at the Yaqui River thirteen years before, had been struck down (as if revengefully) by another Geronimo on the banks of another river thousands of leagues away”; see Little Brown Brother (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 292.
McKinley’s explanation of how he decided to colonize the Philippines is found in “Remarks to Methodist Delegation,” The Philippines Reader, edited by Daniel Schirmer and Stephen Shalom (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 22-23. Cited in Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 86.
In diametrical opposition to the self-righteous, racist patronage of the commentaries we read today, it is an immense joy to find splendid accounts of recent cultural/political developments like Eugene Van Erven’s The Playful Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972) and Lois West, Militant Labor in the Philippines (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997). With the current revision of Establishment canons and the emergence of “cultural studies” with radical or oppositional orientation, we hope that the parochial chauvinism of Filipinologists like Netzorg, Eggan, and their ilk can be permanently consigned to the museum of colonial artifacts without much loss for a new generation of students.

33. Leigh and Richard Kagan, “Oh Say Can You See? American Cultural Blinders on China,” in America’s Asia: Dissenting Essays on Asian American Relations (New YOrk: Vintage Books), 31. The modernization theory of Walt Rostow and Clifford Geertz that informs Cold War scholarship on the Philippines is criticized by Thomas C. Patterson, Inventing Western Civilization (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997).
In a provocative essay on United States interventions in the “Third World,” Eqbal Ahmad underscores the tradition of bargaining, co-optation, or management in U.S. political culture for those located within the boundary of the liberal marketplace. For those defined outside this boundary (American Indians, blacks, etc.), violence and extermination are the chosen modes of maintaining the consensus. Within this authoritarian superstructure exists “a well-defined but extremely permissive infrastructure.” See his Political Culture and Foreign Policy: Notes on American Intervention in the Third World (Washington DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 1982).
Displaced onto a global arena, the practice of technocratic-managerial discourse (as exemplified in the texts cited earlier) underwrites the way American experts on the Philippines have sought to reconcile the everyday violence suffered by impoverished peasants and workers with the accumulation strategy of transnational business. Stauffer has already described the reality of democracy in the Philippines as “that form of intra-elite competition for office via elections during the colonial era, and under conditions where elected officials were given a great deal of symbolic public space but were denied real power which remained firmly anchored in U.S. hands” (“Philippine Democracy: Contradictions of Third world Redemocratization,” Honolulu: Philippine Studies Colloqium, University of Hawaii, 1990, 36).

34. We can demonstrate the real “underside of the collaborative empire,” especially the CIA handling of the Filipino elite, by excerpts from Joseph Smith’s Portrait of a Cold Warrior (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976). One can even venture the scandalous proposition that this book, originally written for popular consumption, affords us a survey of the Filipino comprador oligarchy and its elite representatives more textured and cogent than tomes of statistical analysis turned out by RAND experts and researchers for Congressional committees and the U.S. State Department. Even the enemy can be granted to possess a degree of realism sufficient to manipulate players that would produce results. Their realism is of course the pragmatic calculation of those in power, those determined to preserve the status quo. On the other hand, those resolved to alter that situation–one deemed unjust, painful, and inhumane by the standards of the world’s conscience–would have more reason to be clear-eyed, sensitive, and cognizant of as many factors and forces in play, and on guard lest illusions of success or utopia waylay them. That of course is not always the case. Nonetheless the views of Filipino protagonists cannot be dismissed as unreliable simply because they are partisan, nationalist or egalitarian. After all, what study of social phenomena does not proceed from a certain framework or set of informing assumptions? For this general topic, see Martin Shaw, Marxism and Social Science (London: Pluto Press, 1975).

36. Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 80-82. The persistence of exoticization inheres in the denial of coevalness to the “Other,” as explained by Johannes Fabian in Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
For the situation of Filipina women under U.S. colonial rule, see Elizabeth Uy Eviota, The Political Economy of Gender (London: Zed Books, 1992), 63-76.

38. Theodore Friend, “Latin Ghosts Haunt an Asian Nation,” Heritage (December 1989), 4. Friend may be the original source of the revisionist thesis when he claimed in 1965 that “The democracy which evolved [in the Philippines] was a complex result of native tradition and aspiration, of imperial sufferance and restraint”; see his Between Two Empires: The Ordeal of the Philippines 1929-1946 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 33. The idea is elaborated by Peter Stanley in the volume he edited, Reappraising an Empire: New Perspectives on Philippine-American History, which I cited earlier. An ironic confirmation of the thesis may be found in Amado Doronila, The State, Economic Transformation, and Political Change in the Philippines, 1946-1972 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1992), 35-40.

39. Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 177. On the concept of “combined and unequal development, ” see Michael Lowy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development (London: NLB, 1981); Ernest Mandel, “The Relevance of Marxist Theory for Understanding the Present World Crisis,” in Marxism in the Postmodern Age edited by Antonio Callari, Stephen Cullenberg, and Carole Biewener (New York: The Guilford Press, 1996, 436-447); and Neil Smith, Uneven Development (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984).

40. Karl Korsch, “Independence Comes to the Philippines,” Alternative (1965), translated by Mark Ritter in Midweek (June 6, 1990), 40-42. Ferdinand Blumentritt, Rizal’s close friend, expressed opposition to U.S. annexation of the Philippines in an article published in Washington Sentinel (March 10, 1900) and doubted whether the Filipinos will progress under U.S. rule: “The experience of the American Indians…does not speak in favor of the so-called mission of civilization, which used lead, powder and muskets as means of propagation.” Two works of that period resonate with Luis Taruc’s Born of the People (New York: International Publishers, 1953): Chris Andrews, “American Imperialism in the Philippines,” Fourth International (February 1946), 41-44; and Benjamin Appel, Fortress in the Rice (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1941), one of the few novels by a progressive American writer that registers the “structure of feeling” behind the Huk rebellion and the extraordinarily durable Filipino tradition of anticolonial insurgency. See also Hernando J. Abaya, The Untold Philippine Story (Quezon City: Malaya Books, 1967).

42. An example of how the ideology of postmodern chic versatility is played out may be illustrated by a tourist guidebook that enacts a virtual commodification of the Filipino “essence” as one mixing Mexican, Peruvian, Argentinean, and “all the other indios of Madre Espana’s former colonies” given to, among others, “the pursuit of all fads and fashions with avid enjoyment” (Sylvia Mayuga and Alfred Yuson, “In the Wrong Waters,” in Philippines, edited by Hans Johannes Hoefer (Hong Kong: Apa Productions, 1980). The Filipino’s hard act of “sudden shifts from Utopian optimism to moody fatalism” is neither unique nor inimitable. Peoples displaced or transported across borders–slaves, refugees, emigres, fugitives, exiles–and forced to live by cannibalizing cultures and carnivalizing them as well, may be said to exhibit this contrariness, this mirage of protean versatility. This is one contemporary version of what some Filipinos have become as a result of the struggle to endure colonial domination and still try to retain their humanity.

43. For U.S. racism, see Michael Goldfield, The Color of Politics (New York: The New Press, 1997). For a critique of liberal multiculturalism, see E. San Juan, Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression (New York: SUNY, 1995).

44. Antonio Gramsci, Selection from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971). For the dialectical approach, consult David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996).

45. C.L.R. James, American Civilization (Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1993), 109. Two other thinkers may be cited here as helpful in the decolonizing project: Paulo Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), once taught us the elementary lesson of decolonization via “conscientization.” In The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), Fanon outlined the vicissitudes of this Manichean ordeal in the native psyche (in his essay, “On National Culture”), a trial of cunning, resourcefulness, and perseverance.
This then, I submit, is the hard lesson that the Philippine “temptation”–the “civilizing” ethos assuming new disguises at every stage of uneven development–must reinculcate for every generation: oppositions and contradictions cannot be converted into a series of differences for the sake of celebrating a neoliberal pluralism without sacrificing the ultimate goal of justice, participatory democracy, and self-determination of peoples. An aesthetics of “postcolonial” difference is a poor substitute for a politics of thoroughgoing popular-democratic transformation. What makes a real difference is the moment of recognition by the millions of the powerless and disenfranchised that the world can be changed if they can organize and act in order to change iniquitous property/power relations radically. When performed by the masses, cultural criticism within the tradition of Fanon, C.L.R. James, Lu Hsun, Ngugi, Retamar, and others becomes a handmaiden to the process of seizing the initiative and demanding full recognition.

46. For a Foucauldean approach to the colonial experience, see Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), and for an application on U.S.-Philippines transaction, see Vicente Rafael, “White Love: Surveillance and National Resistance in the U.S. Colonization of the Philippines,” in Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism, 185-218.
Symptomatic of over four hundred years of oppression and resistance, this valorization of the fissured and sedimented identity of the “Filipino”–of any survivor of imperial “tutelage,” for that matter–may be read as the trademark of intellectuals uprooted from the popular-democratic struggles of the working masses whose aspiration for freedom and dignity demand the prior satisfaction of basic needs as a fundamental human right. In the era of flexible capitalism, we Filipinos as participants in a process of nationalitarian reconstruction seem to be still lingering at the threshold of modernity. We are still inventing allegories of the birth of Pilipinas, a process of collective imagining and praxis, a project begun at the time when a local tribal chief killed Magellan (shortly after his “discovery” of the islands in 1521) but later on aborted by Admiral Dewey’s incursion into Manila Bay. Complex historical reality always defies “postcolonial” wish-fulfillments.

47. David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1996), 347. See E. San Juan, From Exile to Diaspora: Versions of the Filipino Experience in the United States (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998).

49. Rosalinda Pineda-Ofreneo and Rene E. Ofreneo, “Globalization and Filipino Women Workers,” Philippine Labor Review 19 (January-June 1995), 1-34. See also Rene Ofreneo, Globalization and the Filipino Working Masses (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1995). For earlier studies, see Mamerto Canlas, Mariano Miranda Jr., and James Putzel, Land, Poverty and Politics in the Philippines (London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1988),; James Putzel, A Captive Land (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1992), and James Boyce, The Philippines: The Political Economy of Growth and Impoverishment in the Marcos Era (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993).

50. The fascination with the counter-revolutionary ideology of “civil society” as the solution to the ills of capitalist reification, poverty, and stagnation has misled some former activists into a futile doublebind in which the state becomes mystified and demonized; for an example, see Isagani R. Serrano, Civil Society in the Asia-Pacific Region (Washington DC: Civicus, 1994). See the critique of Sam Noumoff, “Democratic Rights, Resistance and Civil Society.” Unpublished lecture delivered to the Central Party School of the Communist Party of China and the Foreign Ministry Training Institute in Havana, Cuba, in Summer 1996. 7 pages. For a Gramscian application of civil society in international relations, see Enrico Augelli and Craig Murphy, “Gramsci and International Relations” in Gramsci, historical materialism and international relations, edited by Stephen Gill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 127-147.

51. Romeo Capulong, “U.S. Intervention Still the Main Problem of the Filipino People After Marcos.” Talk given at the National Lawyers Guild, National Convention, Denver, Colorado, 11-16 June 1986. New York: PHILCIR Educational Services Program, 1986.
For a survey of the Ramos administration, see “The Ramos Presidency and Human Rights” by KARAPATAN (Quezon City: Alliance for the Advancement of People’s Rights, 1997).